In this day and age of information, the computerization of a clinical record created by a doctor has also been introduced. Such a clinical record is stored in a database by using a terminal apparatus and is allowed to be referred.
As one aspect of the use of the clinical information, there is an example in which prescribed disease cases are retrieved for consideration of characteristics of the disease or in which the incidence of occurrence of a prescribed disease is determined. In order to use the clinical information in such a way, medical terms such as disease names have to be standardized.
However a same abbreviation is often used as a term of different diseases. For example, a plurality of different definitions of the term “ASD” appear in a medical-term dictionary, as follows: ASD for autosensitized dermatitis; ASD for applicator skin distance; ASD for aortic septal defect; and ASD for atrial septal defect.
Furthermore, doctors and the like tend to use abbreviations frequently even in a statement in an electronic clinical record, since they tend to record information as only a reminder for themselves and think of the efficiency of entering a disease name in a clinical record.
On the other hand, an information classification technology is disclosed in Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2009-244950. Furthermore, a technology relating to a machine translation apparatus is disclosed in Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 8-339373.